“12.6 per cent of our population suffers from food insecurity, which is absolutely unacceptable in a country as developed and wealthy as Canada with a thriving agricultural base,” University of Guelph researcher Kelly Hodgins says.

Evan Fraser found that “ethical” food in Canada is often only available to the wealthy. Central to the issue, Hodgins says, is food security.

Alternative food market spaces are often criticized for catering exclusively to wealthy consumers, and the research examines the barriers that limit low-income access. “To have a healthy and just food system, we need to be upholding environmental sustainability, farmer livelihood security and consumer food security. And in that trifecta, we’re missing that third part,” she says.

The alternative food movement has been gaining momentum over the past two decades, Hodgins explains. Farmers’ markets, co-ops and independent retail businesses have arisen across the country as an alternative to the industrial food system.

Hodgins’ own experience as a vendor at her local farmers’ market in Powell River, B.C. propelled the research. After the provincial Farmers’ Market Nutrition Coupon Program came into effect, she became aware of a whole new demographic of shoppers.

“That was a really big a-ha moment for me where I realized that in pursuing ecologically sustainable farming methods and local food economies, and supporting small farmers… I was forgetting about equality and food access for all the people in my community,” she says.

For the study, Hodgins interviewed and surveyed 45 alternative food businesses in B.C. She discovered that while cost is a barrier to making these spaces more equitable, there are other obstacles as well. From issues of social stigma – shoppers only feeling welcome if they have “full wallets” – to geography (many farmers’ markets are only accessible by car).

She stresses that she’s not suggesting that everyone experiencing food insecurity wants to shop at farmers’ markets or organic grocers. Rather, it’s about the agency “to choose the food that they want to and (not be) dependent on a charity system as a Band-Aid solution to meet their family’s food and nutrition requirements.”

While some of her respondents rejected the stereotype that low-income individuals lack food education, Hodgins says it remains a pervasive assumption that hinders progress. She explains that while food literacy and cooking skills are declining in Canada as a whole, this has “very little if anything” to do with socioeconomic status.

“It’s a societally-held idea to a degree that ‘Poor people don’t know how to cook’ or ‘Even if they could get broccoli or kale they wouldn’t know what to do with it’ and these are really, really problematic assumptions,” she says.

“It stalls any sort of action towards making change because people use it as an explanation for why we shouldn’t do anything. ‘Why bother?’ so to speak.”

Hodgins emphasizes that the issue of equal access to “ethical” food isn’t a problem that will be solved solely at the business level. Although there are steps operators can take to consider the needs of all consumers, these are systemic problems.

“I think we can all agree that food is what brings people together and always has for millennia. But when we put it into a market space, some of that gets stripped away,” she says.

“So much of the food insecurity that we’re seeing in Canada is a direct result of poverty and that is something that needs to be addressed through policy. This isn’t a job that can be just addressed by farmers’ markets throwing a street party or your local co-op having a sale… They are massive structural issues.”